PG Architecture Unit 06 Postgraduate Architecture – Units

Unit brief

This year, Unit 06 will be working in Athens, continuing our 3-year investigation of housing, social infrastructure and people in displacement. We will focus our study in the Dourgouti neighbourhood area of Neos Kosmos (New World) located just to the south of the Acropolis - a historical area of ‘arrival’ and settlement for refugees and migrants for over a century. Such an area, also known as prosfygika (refugee housing), contains several separate housing types and developments which chart the progress of city building and urban integration in Athens since the early 20th century.

The year will commence with a close look at the construction of the polykatoikia building typology, with its concrete frame and various infills, which both create the ‘look’ of modern Athens and respond to socio-economic realities of development and construction, as well as the demanding climate in this part of the Mediterranean. Individual design work will be reassembled in new facades to create a new context for construction.

The year will commence with a close look at the construction of the polykatoikia building typology, with its concrete frame and various infills, which both create the ‘look’ of modern Athens and respond to socio-economic realities of development and construction, as well as the demanding climate in this part of the Mediterranean. Individual design work will be reassembled in new facades to create a new context for construction.

This will be followed by a field trip to Athens, a transformative city with a rich history, at the eastern edge of Europe. Students will work collaboratively to produce a detailed study map of the Dourgouti neighbourhood and wider Neos Kosmos area. Close engagement with the resident local population through hands-on activities will provide you with first-hand information and experiences from which you will generate meaningful architectural discourse for your personal approaches to these pressing contemporary issues, solidly connected to the realities of this particular place within the city. It will also provide you with first-hand experience of examples of the construction.

By locating the unit within the context of sustainable development, and the current, critical exchange about the future of refugees in Athens, we will interrogate an area of investigation in and around the 1930s Dourgouti Bauhaus housing blocks. As part of this process, we will assemble pieces of social infrastructure and imagine future opportunities for displaced homemakers within your own chosen sites. We will encourage you to welcome the idea of ‘becoming’ and of imagining the ‘city yet to come’, built and maintained with local capabilities and pre-existing form and materials.

Working with ARCSR partners in Athens, we will help you to find new ways of looking, imagining and representing your ideas, whilst cooperating with fellow students as a unit group during a weekly series of workshops, seminars and individual tutorials. You will craft your own brief and manifesto to imagine the introduction of new social cohabitation and shared spaces from a narrative assembled from your physical and sociocultural investigations, as a mechanism to address, through your own responses, issues relating to climate change and the built environment, such as global warming, water security, low-cost and low-carbon construction techniques, thermal performance and material culture. Topics such as biophilia and increasing trends towards urban farming and local food production will be part of strategies introduced to you in measured instalments throughout the course as appropriate, through productive workshops led by invited guests.

In addition to the field trip in October 2023, there will be a further opportunity to join a 4-week live project residency in Athens in summer 2024, funded by the Turing Scheme.

Studies will be carried out with optimism, in the expectation that the creative interplay between the energy of students and residents’ ongoing act of dwelling will generate a valuable and meaningful architectural discourse around engagement with the architectural opportunities and responsibilities available within civic topography.

Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources